Sustainability

A good idea isn't enough in any educational situation. It takes two very different kinds of sustainability to make any "innovation" worth bothering. First, the idea has to be useful to students or other users enough for them to own that idea, to innovate or vary their approaches due to the idea itself, and to have that transformation continue to transform whatever system is affected. That is neither obvious nor particularly easy. Lots of good ideas - project based learning comes to mind - are essentially close ended: that is they have a beginning, middle, and end, and produce something that may be nice, but has no point other than meeting an assignment, fulfilling a goal stated by somebody else, or meeting an expectation of some governing or "higher" authority. Many good ideas are just riffs on bad ideas, better ways to do standard things, rather than really new ways to do things unanticipated, and demonstrate many kinds of knowledge expected but in unexpected ways.

The second problem is perhaps easier to solve: sustainability depends on the "adoption" of the "innovation" by some system, teacher, administrator, bureaucrat, school, parent group, or organization or organizing principle that last longer than the project or problem or class or lesson. This issue of the "diffusion of innovation" has been the subject of lots of research - from Everett Rogers (http://www.amazon.com/Diffusion-Innovations-5th-Everett-Rogers/dp/0743222091/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/102-3647020-0558541?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1176080523&sr=1-1) to the studies of the Post-Sputnik innovations of the 1960's after the failure of New Math and New Science (from Paul Marsh and his updates like http://www.infoamerica.org/documentos_pdf/difusion_teoria.pdf). Much of this research addressed special cases - like the diffusion of agricultural innovation, or the sharing of particular educational practices - but, in general, it described a 25 year cycle during which an innovation became a tradition in about half the settings where it could be used. Various authors posited three to six phases of adoption, and a relative bell curve from those who early adopt to those who laggardly refuse to adopt.

That's all fine, but it does not address the more recent issues of technology adoption, of marketing and of information network theory which might be engaged to accelerate adoption or adaptation or - in the cases we promote - the sympathetic transformation whereby an innovation becomes the idea actually owned and promoted by those who sustain it's central transformative function.

That is also all fine, but the two - or three - different understandings of diffusion are not mutually exclusive. They feed on each other. Even the Rogers material posited some who adopt early - the networkers of new tech, for example - and those who adopt late or never. What that literature amply demonstrates is that adoption is too narrow a concept, since New Math, for one livid example, was adopted and then undermined, watered down into a variety of whole language like applications which are still being argued, still being undermined, and still highly contentious. The problem is that the "innovation" was too rigid to be owned by the adopter, too narrow to be adapted and changed in different settings, and too naively promoted as the "next new thing" to answer those who stuck by "tried and true" solutions.

Schools are not the typical markets. They are political systems that include professional, amateur, parent and tradition, new, young, and old, and a particular innovation will be seen as subversive or attractive depending on when, by whom, for what, and how it is first suggested. That requires a very unusual kind of marketing. Just because students might learn more things faster and with less pain and fear at lower cost and with higher expectations is not enough. An innovation must engage teachers, parents, administrators and politicians as well, and they must all have some kind of shared ownership.

That mandates a very different kind of "evaluation," "marketing," teacher and student training, documentation, credibility and engagement. It requires that the innovator look carefully at the potential market and tune that evaluation to anticipate opposition that can be whimsical to rigorous, naive to punitive, traditional to radical. And that the evaluation itself be in language, medium, and style as attractive as possible to any potential adopting party.

Wow.

A good idea is certainly not enough.